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Latest Developments
- Governments and citizens committed to improving public safety and access to justice need objective measures of progress. But knowledge about how to develop practical, effective performance indicators is in short supply. To meet this need, a team of researchers at Vera have produced a plain-language global guide to the design of indicators for both the safety and justice sector as a whole and for specific institutions.
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Overview
In South Africa, where nearly half of all inmates in prison are waiting to be tried, the Bureau of Justice Assistance(BJA) is uncovering reasons behind this excessive use of pretrial detention and ways to reduce it. Since 1997, when South Africa's Ministry of Justice and Vera established the bureau to design, test, and evaluate projects that could strengthen the country's newly democratic legal system, its staff have worked with police, prosecutors, and community groups on a range of reforms.
Half the world away in Moscow, the Center for Justice Assistance (CJA) has also been collaborating with government and with nongovernmental organizations since 2000 to advance justice by testing new ideas. One current project, First Contact, builds trust between citizens and police in the city of Nizhy Novgorod by improving the experience of reporting a crime. CJA is the fruit of a partnership between Vera and the INDEM Foundation, one of the oldest, most respected nongovernmental organizations in Russia.
Both of these young institutions drew heavily on Vera's approach to reforming public systems and under Vera’s guidance became viable, independent organizations. CJA is now a subsidiary of INDEM, and BJA has become an independent nonprofit with its own governing board. But from the beginning, these centers also looked to institutions other than Vera and to countries other than the United States for inspiration and insight. And their pioneering projects have attracted the attention of reformers working in different cultures, languages, and legal systems. In an increasingly close-knit world, where the challenges of delivering justice are more similar across countries than they are different, these centers illustrate the importance of taking a multicultural approach to justice reform.
This approach became central to Vera's own method and mission, in April when the Institute formally joined with organizations in five other countries to form a unique alliance called Altus. With members based in Brazil, Chile, India, Nigeria, Russia, and the United States, Altus offers its members and the field generally a truly global perspective on issues of safety and justice, a greater capacity to work across borders, and a larger role for civil society in advancing justice.
Even before launching BJA in South Africa, Vera was encouraging global conversations on issues of justice. For nearly eight years, Vera has worked in partnership with the Ford Foundation to help people around the world share ideas about the appropriate role for law enforcement in a democratic society. This past October, Vera and the Center for Studies on Public Security and Citizenship (Centro de Estudos de Segurança e Cidadania) in Rio de Janeiro held a three-day meeting in Brazil on the subject of women and policing that involved participants from around the world, and the final meeting in this series will take place in China in April.
Researchers at Vera and the Inter-American Development Bank are working with their counterparts in the Bahamas, Barbados, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago to develop research strategies that will shape national priorities in the area of public safety and security. And in another cross-cultural project, a team of researchers at Vera worked with staff of the British Department for International Development to produce a global guide to the design and use of performance indicators for the justice system.
Cross-cultural learning takes many forms. Representatives from the China University of Political Science and Law recently spent a month at Vera, studying the Institute’s model of planning demonstration projects and employing action-oriented, empirically-based research. They came to learn from Vera’s planners, researchers, and government partners but discovered they have as much to offer as they hoped to gain.
[ last modified 10/9/2007 12:27:26 PM ] |
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